Representatives of future generations as promoters of sustainability in corporate decision processes

Abstract

Current protests of the young generation emphasize that interests of future generations should be taken more into account by policy makers and in corporate decision processes. As organizations contribute to enduring environmental and social problems, they are required to promote sustainability in order to preserve options for the well‐being of future generations. However, organizational decision makers often take a short‐term perspective and neglect investments in intergenerational justice. Previous theoretical work has acknowledged the importance of representing future generations in today's decision‐making processes to adopt a long‐term perspective in order to promote intergenerational justice. In a laboratory experiment, we show that appointing representatives of future generations at the organizational level can foster investments in intergenerational justice. Although this outcome is more pronounced when aligned with the representatives' individual incentives, it even persists for a representative who is monetarily penalized for advocating the interests of future generations.

Deliberative Forms of Democracy and Intergenerational Sustainability Dilemma

“…Finally, we note some limitations and possibilities for future research. First, we should not overlook that generations fail in ensuring high levels of IS under three models of decision-making, implying that some drastic change or new forms of social institutions along with democracy may be necessary as discussed in the literature [15,19,31,32,131]. Second, we only consider direct democracy as experimental treatments in this research.…”

“…In the context of IS problems, future generations tend to be underrepresented in collective decision-making [11,14,19]. The difficulty arises because future generations can neither communicate nor represent their voices with the current generation, especially when they do not have overlapping life time.…”

“…For instance, climate change problems shall adversely affect future generations that are not born yet; however, such unborn future generations do not have any means to convey what they want to the current generation in the decision-making process. Several researchers have empirically and experimentally studied IS problems, employing some decision-making models of deliberation and/or voting [3,19,[72][73][74][75][76][77][78][79][80][81][82]. Gronlund et al [22] compare people's knowledge and opinions on long-run energy politics under traditional face-to-face and online deliberation, suggesting that both settings only enhance people's knowledge.…”

“…The short-term tendencies in democracy are exacerbated, especially when people become autonomous and alienated from societies with limited social interactions, making themselves myopic [15][16][17]. There are uprising voices and demands to address IS problems so that future generations' welfare, concerns, and voices should be reflected in the current practices of democracy [8,18,19]. Public protests around Greta Thunberg can be considered such an example for future generations' voices in relation to climate change [19].…”

“…There are uprising voices and demands to address IS problems so that future generations' welfare, concerns, and voices should be reflected in the current practices of democracy [8,18,19]. Public protests around Greta Thunberg can be considered such an example for future generations' voices in relation to climate change [19].…”